The Political Uses of Cultural Diversity

This book examines how states deploy cultural recognition and inclusion policies to build modernized national identities in diverse societies but reveals they also pay other useful dividends for governments.

It focuses on three pluralist postcolonial settler states in the cases of Australia, Canada and New Zealand, all of which are characterized by cultural pluralism stemming from colonial history and the presence of Indigenous peoples, and diverse migration. Analyzing policy and political discourse, it reveals that official cultural recognition plays a key role in building and reinforcing national identity but that the social cohesion and community it brings domestically is matched by signalling a nation-state’s modernized status as postcolonial and post-racist to the global economy. The book also explores the ways in which religious diversity poses particular challenges to these strategies of ethno-cultural recognition and appropriation.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political science, comparative politics, public policy, political theory and political sociology, political anthropology.